The Third Address
May, 1871

[Paris Workers’ Revolution
& Thiers’ Reactionary Massacres]

Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the
counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Paris was, therefore, to be disarmed.

On this point, the Bordeaux Assembly [National Assembly] was sincerity
itself. If the roaring rant of its Rurals had not been audible enough, the
surrender of Paris by Thiers to the tender mercies of the triumvirate of
Vinoy the Decembriseur, Valentin the Bonapartist gendarme,
and Aurelles de Paladine the Jesuit general, would have cut off even the last
subterfuge of doubt.

But while insultingly exhibiting the true purpose of the disarmament of
Paris, the conspirators asked her to lay down her arms on a pretext which was
the most glaring, the most barefaced of lies. The artillery of the Paris
National Guard, said Thiers, belonged to the state, and to the state it must
be returned. The fact was this: From the very day of the capitulation, by
which Bismarck’s prisoners had signed the surrender of France, but
reserved to themselves a numerous bodyguard for the express purpose of cowing
Paris, Paris stood on the watch. The National Guard reorganized themselves
and entrusted their supreme control to a Central Committee elected by their
whole body, save some fragments of the old Bonapartist formations. On the eve
of the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, the Central Committee took
measures for the removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette, of the
cannon and mitrailleuses treacherously abandoned by the
capitulards in and about the very quarters the Prussians were to
occupy. That artillery had been furnished by the subscriptions of the
National Guard. As their private property, it was officially recognized in
the capitulation of January 28, and on that very title exempted from the
general surrender, into the hands of the conqueror, or arms belonging to the
government. And Thiers was so utterly destitute of even the flimsiest pretext
for initiating the war against Paris, that he had to resort to the flagrant
lie of the artillery of the National Guard being state property!

The seizure of her artillery was evidently but to serve as the preliminary
to the general disarmament of Paris, and, therefore, of the Revolution of
September 4. But that revolution had become the legal status of France. The
republic, its work, was recognized by the conqueror in the terms of the
capitulation. After the capitulation, it was acknowledged by all foreign
powers, and in its name, the National Assembly had been summoned. The Paris
working men’s revolution of September 4 was the only legal title of the
National Assembly seated at Bordeaux, and of its executive. Without it, the
National Assembly would at once have to give way to the Corps
Legislatif elected in 1869 by universal suffrage under French, not under
Prussian, rule, and forcibly dispersed by the arm of the revolution. Thiers
and his ticket-of-leave men would have had to capitulate for safe conducts
signed by Louis Bonaparte, to save them from a voyage to Cayenne[A]. The National Assembly,
with its power of attorney to settle the terms of peace with Prussia, was but
an incident of that revolution, the true embodiment of which was still armed
Paris, which had initiated it, undergone for it a five-months’ siege,
with its horrors of famine, and made her prolonged resistance, despite
Trochu’s plan, the basis of an obstinate war of defence in the
provinces. And Paris was now either to lay down her arms at the insulting
behest of the rebellious slaveholders of Bordeaux, and acknowledge that her
Revolution of September 4 meant nothing but a simple transfer of power from
Louis Bonaparte to his royal rivals; or she had to stand forward as the
self-sacrificing champion of France, whose salvation from ruin and whose
regeneration were impossible without the revolutionary overthrow of the
political and social conditions that had engendered the Second Empire, and
under its fostering care, matured into utter rottenness. Paris, emaciated by
a five-months’ famine, did not hesitate one moment. She heroically
resolved to run all the hazards of a resistance against French conspirators,
even with Prussian cannon frowning upon her from her own forts. Still, in its
abhorrence of the civil war into which Paris was to be goaded, the Central
Committee continued to persist in a merely defensive attitude, despite the
provocations of the Assembly, the usurpations of the Executive, and the
menacing concentration of troops in and around Paris.

Thiers opened the civil war by sending Vinoy, at the head of a multitude
of sergents-de-ville, and some regiments of the line, upon a
nocturnal expedition against Montmartre, there to seize, by surprise, the
artillery of the National Guard. It is well known how this attempt broke down
before the resistance of the National Guard and the fraternization of the
line with the people. Aurelles de Paldine had printed beforehand his bulletin
of victory, and Thiers held ready the placards announcing his measures of
coup d’etat. Now these had to be replaced by Thiers’ appeals,
imparting his magnanimous resolve to leave the National Guard in the
possession of their arms, with which, he said, he felt sure they would rally
round the government against the rebels. Out of 300,000 National guards, only
300 responded to this summons to rally around little Thiers against
themselves. The glorious working men’s Revolution of March 18 took
undisputed sway of Paris. The Central Committee was its provisional
government. Europe seemed, for a moment, to doubt whether its recent
sensational performances of state and war had any reality in them, or whether
they were the dreams of a long bygone past.

From March 18 to the entrance of the Versailles troops into Paris, the
proletarian revolution remained so free from the acts of violence in which
the revolutions – and still more the counter-revolutions – of the
“better classes” abound, that no facts were left to its opponents
to cry out about, but the executions of Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas,
and the affair of the Place Vendome.

One of the Bonapartist officers engaged in the nocturnal attempt against
Montmartre, General Lecomte, had four times ordered the 81st line regiment to
fire at an unarmed gathering in the Place Pigalle, and on their refusal
fiercely insulted them. Instead of shooting women and children, his own men
shot him. The inveterate habits acquired by the soldiery under the training
of the enemies of the working class are, of course, not likely to change the
very moment these soldiers change sides. The same men executed Clement
Thomas.

“General” Clement Thomas, a malcontent
ex-quartermaster-sergeant, had, in the latter times of Louis Philippe’s
reign, enlisted at the office of the republican newspaper Le
National, there to serve in the double capacity of responsible
man-of-straw (gerant responsable) and of duelling bully to that very
combative journal. After the February Revolution, the men of the
National having got into power, they metamorphosed this old
quarter-master-sergeant into a general on the eve of the butchery of June
– of which he, like Jules Favre, was one of the sinister plotters, and
became one of the most dastardly executioners. Then he and his generalship
disappeared for a long time, to again rise to the surface on November 1,
1870. The day before, the Government of National Defence, caught at the Hotel
de Ville, had solemnly pledged their parole to Blanqui, Flourens, and other
representatives of the working class, to abdicate their usurped power into
the hands of a commune to be freely elected by Paris.[B] Instead of keeping their word, they let
loose on Paris the Bretons of Trochu, who now replaced the Corsicans of
Bonaparte.[C] General
Tamisier alone, refusing to sully his name by such a breach of faith,
resigned the commandership-in-chief of the National Guard, and in his place
Clement Thomas for once became again a general. During the whole of his
tenure of command, he made war, not upon the Prussians, but upon the Paris
National Guard. He prevented their general armament, pitted the bourgeois
battalions against the working men’s battalions, weeded out officers
hostile to Trochu’s “plan,” and disbanded, under the stigma
of cowardice, the very same proletarian battalions whose heroism has now
astonished their most inveterate enemies. Clement Thomas felt quite proud of
having reconquered his June pre-eminence as the personal enemy of the working
class of Paris. Only a few days before March 18, he laid before the War
Minister, Leflo, a plan of his own for “finishing off la fine
fleur [the cream] of the Paris canaille.” After Vinoy’s
rout, he must needs appear upon the scene of action in the quality of an
amateur spy. The Central Committee and the Paris working men were as much
responsible for the killing of Clement Thomas and Lecomte as the Princess of
Wales for the fate of the people crushed to death on the day of her entrance
into London.

The massacre of unarmed citizens in Place Vendome is a myth which M.
Thiers and the Rurals persistently ignored in the Assembly, entrusting its
propagation exclusively to the servants’ hall of European journalism.
“The men of order,” the reactionists of Paris, trembled at the
victory of March 18. To them, it was the signal of popular retribution at
last arriving. The ghosts of the victims assassinated at their hands from the
days of June 1848, down to January 22, 1871,[D] arose before their faces. Their panic was their only
punishment. Even the sergents-de-ville, instead of being disarmed
and locked up, as ought to have been done, had the gates of Paris flung open
wide for their safe retreat to Versailles. The men of order were left not
only unharmed, but allowed to rally and quietly seize more than one
stronghold in the very centre of Paris. This indulgence of the Central
Committee – this magnanimity of the armed working men – so
strangely at variance with the habits of the “Party of Order,”
the latter misinterpreted as mere symptoms of conscious weakness. Hence their
silly plan to try, under the cloak of an unarmed demonstration, what Vinoy
had failed to perform with his cannon and mitrailleuses. On March
22, a riotous mob of swells started from the quarters of luxury, all the
petits creves in their ranks, and at their head the notorious
familiars of the empire – the Heeckeren, Coetlogon, Henri de Pene, etc.
Under the cowardly pretence of a pacific demonstration, this rabble, secretly
armed with the weapons of the bravo [i.e. hired
assassin], fell into marching order, ill-treated and disarmed the
detached patrols and sentries of the National Guard they met with on their
progress, and, on debouching from the Rue de la Paix, with the cry of
“Down with the Central Committee! Down with the assassins! The National
Assembly forever!” attempted to break through the line drawn up there,
and thus to carry by surprise the headquarters of the National Guard in the
Place Vendome. In reply to their pistol-shots, the regular
sommations (the French equivalent of the English Riot Act)[E] were made, and, proving
ineffective, fire was commanded by the general [Bergeret] of the National
Guard. One volley dispersed into wild flight the silly coxcombs, who expected
that the mere exhibition of their “respectability” would have the
same effect upon the Revolution of Paris as Joshua’s trumpets upon the
walls of Jericho. The runaways left behind them two National Guards killed,
nine severely wounded (among them a member of the Central Committee
[Maljournal]), and the whole scene of their exploit strewn with revolvers,
daggers, and sword-canes, in evidence of the “unarmed” character
of their “pacific” demonstration. When, on June 13, 1849, the
National Guard made a really pacific demonstration in protest against the
felonious assault of French troops upon Rome, Changarnier, then general of
the Party of Order, was acclaimed by the National Assembly, and especially by
M. Thiers, as the savior of society, for having launched his troops from all
sides upon these unarmed men, to shoot and sabre them down, and to trample
them under their horses’ feet. Paris, then was placed under a state of
siege. Dufaure hurried through the Assembly new laws of repression. New
arrests, new proscriptions – a new reign of terror set in. But the
lower orders manage these things otherwise. The Central Committee of 1871
simply ignored the heroes of the “pacific demonstration"; so much so,
that only two days later, they were enabled to muster under Admiral Saisset,
for that armed demonstration, crowned by the famous stampede to
Versailles. In their reluctance to continue the civil war opened by
Thiers’ burglarious attempt on Montmartre, the Central Committee made
themselves, this time, guilty of a decisive mistake in not at once marching
upon Versailles, then completely helpless, and thus putting an end to the
conspiracies of Thiers and his Rurals. Instead of this, the Party of Order
was again allowed to try its strength at the ballot box, on March 26, the day
of the election of the Commune. Then, in the mairies of Paris, they
exchanged bland words of conciliation with their too generous conquerors,
muttering in their hearts solemn vows to exterminate them in due time.

Now, look at the reverse of the medal. Thiers opened his second campaign
against Paris in the beginning of April. The first batch of Parisian
prisoners brought into Versailles was subjected to revolting atrocities,
while Ernest Picard, with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, strolled
about jeering them, and while Mesdames Thiers and Favre, in the midst of
their ladies of honor (?) applauded, from the balcony, the outrages of the
Versailles mob. The captured soldiers of the line were massacred in cold
blood; our brave friend, General Duval, the iron-founder, was shot without
any form of trial. Galifet, the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her
shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empire, boasted in a
proclamation of having commanded the murder of a small troop of National
Guards, with their captain and lieutenant, surprised and disarmed by his
Chasseurs. Vinoy, the runaway, was appointed by Thiers, Grand Cross of the
Legion of Honor, for his general order to shoot down every soldier of the
line taken in the ranks of the Federals. Desmaret, the Gendarme, was
decorated for the treacherous butcher-like chopping in pieces of the
high-souled and chivalrous Flourens, who had saved the heads of the
Government of Defence on October 31, 1870.[F] “The encouraging particulars” of his
assassination were triumphantly expatiated upon by Thiers in the National
Assembly. With the elated vanity of a parliamentary Tom Thumb permitted to
play the part of a Tamerlane, he denied the rebels the right of neutrality
for ambulances. Nothing more horrid than that monkey allowed for a time to
give full fling to his tigerish instincts, as foreseen by
Voltaire.[Candide, Ch. 22](See news articles)

After the decree of the Commune of April 7, ordering reprisals and
declaring it to be the duty “to protect Paris against the cannibal
exploits of the Versailles banditti, and to demand an eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth,” [G]
Thiers did not stop the barbarous treatment of prisoners, moreover, insulting
them in his bulletins as follows: “Never have more degraded
countenances of a degraded democracy met the afflicted gazes of honest
men” – honest, like Thiers himself and his ministerial
ticket-of-leave men. Still, the shooting of prisoners was suspended for a
time. Hardly, however, had Thiers and his Decembrist generals [of the December 2, 1851 coup by Louis Bonaparte]
become aware that the Communal decree of reprisals was but an empty threat,
that even their gendarme spies caught in Paris under the disguise of National
Guards, that even sergents-de-ville, taken with incendiary shells
upon them, were spared – when the wholesale shooting of prisoners was
resumed and carried on uninterruptedly to the end. Houses to which National
Guards had fled were surrounded by gendarmes, inundated with petroleum (which
here occurs for the first time in this war), and then set fire to, the
charred corpses being afterwards brought out by the ambulance of the Press at
the Ternes. Four National Guards having surrendered to a troop of mounted
Chasseurs at Belle Epine, on April 25, were afterwards shot down, one after
another, by the captain, a worthy man of Gallifet’s. One of his four
victims, left for dead, Scheffer, crawled back to the Parisian outposts, and
deposed to this fact before a commission of the Commune. When Tolain
interpellated the War Minister upon the report of this commission, the Rurals
drowned his voice and forbade Leflo to answer. It would be an insult to their
“glorious” army to speak of its deeds. The flippant tone in which
Thiers’ bulletin announced the bayoneting of the Federals, surprised
asleep at Moulin Saquet, and the wholesale fusillades at Clamart shocked the
nerves even of the not over-sensitive London Times. But it would be
ludicrous today to attempt recounting the merely preliminary atrocities
committed by the bombarders of Paris and the fomenters of a
slaveholders’ rebellion protected by foreign invasion. Amidst all these
horrors, Thiers, forgetful of his parliamentary laments on the terrible
responsibility weighing down his dwarfish shoulders, boasts in his bulletins
that l’Assemblee siege paisiblement (the Assembly continues
meeting in peace), and proves by his constant carousals, now with Decembrist
generals, now with German princes, that his digestion is not troubled in the
least, not even by the ghosts of Lecomte and Clement Thomas.

[A] A town in French Guiana (Northern South America),
penal settlement and place of exile.

[B] On October 31, 1870, upon the receipt of news that the
Government of National Defense had decided to start negotiations with the
Prussians, the Paris workers and revolutionary sections of the National Guard
rose up in revolt. They seized the town hall and set up their revolutionary
government – the Committee of Public Safety, headed by Blanqui. Under
pressure from the workers the Government of National Defense promised to
resign and schedule national elections to the Commune for November 1. The
government then, with the aid of some loyal battalions of the National Guard,
seized the town hall by force of arms and re-established its domination.

[C]Bretons – Breton Mobile Guard which
Trochu used as gendarmes to put down the revolutionary movement in Paris.Corsicans – constituted a considerable part of the gendarmes
corps during the Second Empire.

[D] On January 22, 1871, the Paris proletariat and the
National Guards held a revolutionary demonstration initiated by the
Blanquists. They demanded the overthrow of the government and the
establishment of a Commune. By order of the Government of National Defense,
the Breton Mobile Guard, which was defending the town hall, opened fire on
the demonstrators. After massacring the workers, the government began
preparations to surrender Paris to the Germans.

[E] Sommations (a preliminary demand to disburse) –
under the laws of most bourgeois states, this demand is repeated three times,
following which the armed police are entitled to resort to force. The
Riot Act was introduced in England in 1715. It prohibited “rebel
gatherings” of more than 12 people in a group, giving the authorities
the right to use force if the crowd did not disperse within an hour after the
reading out of the sommations three times.

[F] On October 31, Flourens prevented the members of the
Government of National Defense from being shot, as had been demanded by one
of the insurrectionists.

[G] A reference to the decree on hostages adopted by the
Commune on April 5, 1871. (Marx gives the date of its publication in the
English press.) Under this decree, all persons found guilty of being in
contact with Versailles were declared hostages. By this decree the Commune
sought to prevent Communards from being shot by the Versaillists.